‘Why should I tell you? Shall you threaten me with the whip again?’
I loosed her hands. She gave a sudden glance up the hill. She seemed to measure the distance.
‘Why do you want to go to the top of the hill?’ I asked. ‘Have you friends there?’
She denied the suggestion, as I thought she would.
‘No, I have not. But anywhere is better than with you.’
‘Yet there’s some one in the cottage up there,’ I observed. ‘It belongs to Constantine, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does,’ she answered defiantly. ‘Dare you go and seek him there? Or dare you only skulk behind the walls of the house?’
‘As long as we are four against a hundred I dare only skulk,’ I answered. She did not annoy me at all by her taunts. ‘But do you think he’s there?’
‘There! No; he’s in the town; and he’ll come from the town to kill you to-morrow.’